Inside the social economy of The Elder Scrolls Online, almost everything is up for sale even vampirism. But House Annunaki, an Ebonheart Pact vampire guild in TESO, wants to turn that economy on its head by offering the precious vampire bites for free beginning May 1, according to the most recent issue of developer Zenimax Online's Tamriel Chronicle.

If you can make your way to the Riften city docks next week on the North American Megaserver, the vampires of House Annunaki will infect your player at every sunrise through May 7, when the event ends. Without an official auction house, much of the recently released MMO's developing social atmosphere revolves around the bartering of items using TESO's in-game gold. And since the shiny stuff is so slow to accumulate, the vampire guild seems to be making a statement about its particular vision for the game's roleplaying experience. House Annunaki clearly wants to undermine the budding market in vampire bites.

"We have all joined together to stop the selling of bites in ESO!" reports the vampire guild on its website. "This underground economy needs to be stopped! Join us in the fight to stop bite selling and scamming!"

In addition to getting official recognition for its event in the Tamriel Chronicle, the guild has set up a Twitter for all things vampire-bite related which you can find here. For more on TESO, be sure to check out our review.

My empire is in ruins. It had such a strong start, too. My cities were spreading, my resources finely balanced, my army developing into a fearsome force of monsters and heroes. Now they're gone, consumed on three sides by the continuously spawning might of huge, armoured, fire breathing reptiles. I am defeated. By turtles.

At the broadest level, Warlock 2 plays like Civilization V with wizards. It's a hex-grid turn-based fantasy 4X in which you found cities, construct buildings, conduct research, raise an army and go to war against rival Great Mages. Instead of technology, there are spells; instead of wheat; there are Magic Fields; and instead of bandits, there's a menagerie, including werewolves, vampires, dragons and, yes, the mighty Great Turtle.

Yet the differences go beyond use of magic. It's more streamlined, with a greater emphasis on battle. Where Civ 5's bandits are more of a Band-Aid, livening up the early game, Warlock 2's unaffiliated foes are a constant threat sometimes more deadly than your opponents. It pushes you into a more militaristic campaign. While a show of force isn't the only route to victory, neglecting your army is a sure way to lose.



If you've played the original Warlock: Master of the Arcane, this will all sound familiar. And if you've glanced over the screenshots, this will all look familiar. Warlock 2 does the sequel essentials adding new races, units, monsters and buildings but its changes are more subtle.

The most significant new feature is Exiled mode. It's a campaign in which each Mage is cast out to a small 'shard' dimension. Rather than exploring a single great landmass, here your empire must spread across multiple worlds as you cross through portals and work your way home.

In the sandbox campaign, these worlds fall on the wrong side of risk/reward hiding valuable resources behind an absurd amount of monsters. Whenever I ventured into one, my armies were torn apart quicker than I could reinforce them. In Exiled, shards are smaller, and scale in difficulty as you move through the story. The focus becomes about exploration: working from forest world, to lava world, to death world, while methodically building strength, taking out spawn points and dispatching scripted bosses.



That's assuming you aren't stranded on the wrong end of a randomly generated map. During one attempt, my units were teleported to a section of an ice world surrounded by impassable terrain. Had it happened later, I could have used spells to flatten the mountains, or levitate them across the sea. Instead, I was forced to wait, while my opponents made use of their gifted advantage.

Exiled's strength is the way it encourages players to push forward. Progress means you're closer to victory, but also that your armies are increasingly stretched. An unexpected attack two maps behind your main force can require some inventive solutions. Spells can help, but do you summon up monsters, target with elemental damage, or hasten your troops and rush back to a city under seige?

For all the mode's triumphs, quests are repeated each playthrough, meaning the majority of my time was spent in the more dynamic sandbox. Here things are more familiar, focusing on relatively minor changes from the original game. The best is a new tech tree for spells, which gives proper progression to research. It lets you focus more easily on favoured strategies, whether that's terraforming tiles, doing direct damage, or securing passive bonuses to boost production.



The other significant change is to unit upgrades. Rather than specialising each city around the production of a particular unit type, Warlock 2's military buildings each offer a limited number of bonuses. It shifts building management to an empire-wide level, and stops the churn of ultra-powerful units that, in the first game, led to interminable late-game churn through an enemy's force.

While these are mostly positive changes, they're hardly dramatic, and they're offset by some lingering problems. The most notable is the AI, which across my campaigns would often fail to take the initiative. On normal difficulty, they'd instantly approach with non-aggression pacts and alliances, leaving me free reign to build and position my armies. To the game's credit, the campaign set-up options are flexible enough to mitigate this pacifism. In the end, I settled on the more aggressive opponents of a harder difficulty, but reduced the monster spawn rate to avoid a flood of turtle death squads.

These balance issues aside, it's easy to spend hours warring against fantasy factions. Warlock 2 is now the best version of an enjoyably streamlined strategy series. Unfortunately, for owners of the original, it isn't so much better that it's worth wholeheartedly recommending.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes earnest, sometimes silly column about Dota 2.

I wrote the following article a couple of weeks after I started playing Dota 2, back in July of 2012. Now that I'm approaching my two-year anniversary with the game I've been thinking a bit about why I'd recommend it to other people. There are lots of reasons, obviously. It's exciting, deep, and there's a badger tied to some balloons in it. There's also a mammoth-rhinoceros-minotaur guy who can alter the properties of matter and a shit load of skeletons, albeit fewer of the latter now than there used to be. There are lots of wizards.

What I'm saying is that there are many reasons to like Dota 2, but that doesn't necessarily help somebody face down that vertical learning curve. The game is arguably less forgiving now than it was in beta: the community is larger, and more players are willing to create new accounts to beat up newcomers. The game has had time to settle, and in that environment it's easier to feel like a total outsider.

I started playing Dota 2 because very few games journalists were playing it at the time and everybody knew that it was going to be huge. I didn't expect to like it, and I didn't expect to be writing a weekly column about it two years later. This article marks the point when I started getting something much more substantial out of the game - when I realised that it had more to offer than the other competitive games I'd invested time in.

Also, er, it's deadline week and I've had hardly any time to play Dota. Normal service resumes next week.



Originally published on the 19th of July, 2012.

As discussed on the PC Gamer podcast and described by Quintin Smith in his brilliant series of articles for Eurogamer, I ve been playing a lot of Dota 2. I m playing with a group of writers, some of whom I know fairly well - Rich and Owen, who I work with on PCG - and others that I m meeting for the first time, or have only met briefly in real life. In one case I m playing with someone who I actually have met in real life but I think they ve forgotten and I m hoping that they haven t put two and two together yet because I made an ass of myself and a fresh start sounds pretty good.

What surprises and fascinates me about the game is how social it is: not simply in terms of cooperation or coordination but personality and expression. It s almost intimate, which is a strange thing to say about an isometric RTS variant where the average team is made up of some combination of wizards, swordsmen, helicopters, tree-people, spiders, ghosts and bears. It s part of a notoriously unfriendly genre known for bringing out the worst in people, but its structure - longform group coordination wobbling uneasily on top of a convoluted, Calvinball-esque pile of characters, items, skills and rules - is also what gives it the capacity to be personal.

I performed improvised comedy for a few years at university, the Edinburgh Fringe and a few places in the USA. The group I was part of took improv seriously and experimented constantly, performing shortform Whose Line Is It Anyway-style gameshow stuff as well as longform comedy, improvised drama, and promenade/in situ public performance.

Learning to improvise was one of the hardest things I ve done. I gradually transitioned into acting - including probably the world s shortest attempt at a career in the business - but never experienced the same anxiety, and the same deeply personal sense of failure, that I did as an improviser. Actors are protected by scripts, by the patterns of repetition and improvement inherent to the rehearsal process. Fucked it up? Do it again. Improvisers get no retreads: if you pushed yourself into a scene at the wrong time, or undermined a co-performer to get a rise out of the audience, that happened, you did it, and you can t fix it. You can learn to avoid the core error but you can t return to the scene of the crime and make it go away. The criticism that gets doled out within an improv group is personal, because becoming a better performer means facing down and dealing with ugly personal truths. Insecurity, impatience, ego: you can t fix them, and you probably wouldn t be funny without them, but you can t pretend you don t have them.

Dota 2 has an absurd learning curve, but it s the personal side that attracts me to it and that reminds me of improv. It s not a one-to-one match: the aftermath of a bad improv show looks like a soul-searching pint in an Edinburgh beer garden, while a catastrophic Dota 2 game ends in a collective withdrawal from the process. Silence over Skype, muttered deadpan truths about feeding and failure. But there s a common process of analysis and consolation that produces a technical solution by starting with each player s implicit flaws and tendencies. The crusty mechanical layer fractures and reveals human working parts. Sometimes, the human working parts swear at you in Russian and abandon the match.

We re mostly playing Single Draft, which limits each player s choice of character to a randomised set of three. It s this that completes the improv analogy: where All Pick gives us the freedom to plan (and often overplan) our game, Single Draft forces a rapid calibration of people, roles and skills in the minute before the game begins. It s fraught and ad-hoc and the resulting team structure barely holds together. The group performance is made up of dozens of continual little decisions and anxieties, and even when we ve got an experienced guide there are moments of confusion and crisis where individuals often simply cope, but sometimes shine.

That s exactly what live performance is for. It s a way of getting inside each other s heads and turning out something that could only exist at that time at that place with those people. The more time I spend thinking about games the more I come back to the idea that they re uniquely able to fold ritual, sport, and theatre back into each other. People took conflict and called it play, span it out into kicking a ball, running fast, standing in front of an audience and talking about feelings. Playing Single Draft in the small hours, chatting about work and yelling about the game, pulls together bits and pieces of all of those ideas. Dota 2 s overcomplexity - its visual and mechanical noise - makes it a fantastic stage, a deep and safe intermediary between people.

In the past I ve used a similar argument to defend mechanically flabby MMOs, but Dota 2 compresses that same kind of breadth into hour-long tests of technical skill, self-control, authority and empathy. Its performance-style structure grants form and catharsis to the drama of dealing with chaos. It s a remarkable thing to learn to do with other people.

We're now two weeks in to the Kickstarter campaign for Outcast Reboot HD. So far, it's had a pretty positive reception, raising a respectable $225,000. Unfortunately, the Fresh3D Inc team need to raise $600,000, meaning there's some way to go before their open-world adventure can be airlifted out of the late-'90s. To help raise awareness, the developers have made a sensible move: releasing footage of the game, showing the HD Reboot part of Outcast Reboot HD.



"Keep in mind that it is a very early prototype which is still using some assets from the original version, specially for the characters, animations and effects," write the developers in a Kickstarter update. I'm sure some will be unhappy that there aren't yet full, crisp, high-resolution textures on display. Personally, though, I was pretty thankful for it at least during the trailer's long periods spent lingering on an alien bum.

"For those who don't know the original game," the developers continue, "I hope this video will give them a glimpse of what the game could be if we had the chance to modernize all the components."

If funded, Outcast Reboot HD is planned for an October 2015 release. If that sounds a long way off, you can buy the original exploratory adventure on GOG. Just be warned, as great as it is, it does look like a game released in 1999.

Minecraft's adventure maps have only grown in scale and ambition since we made our first best-of list. Custom maps leverage Minecraft's famous building tools to create curated experiences in exotic worlds. Some are set on floating islands or inside grand mansions, while Zelda Adventure, Crafting Azeroth, Adventure Time Adventure Map, FarCry 3, PortalCraft and Star Wars take place in blocky recreations of more familiar settings. Our old list collating the best adventure maps held 25 of our favourite choices, but there are so many great maps around that we've extended the list to fit more quality stuff in. Head over to our list of the the 40 best Minecraft custom maps for our new collection, with links to all the maps included. Go forth, and adventure well.

This is a clever use for YouTube's annotations feature. Rather than a giant, unavoidable "oh please, why won't you just subscribe" box, this new Evolve trailer lets you jump between the perspectives of the four humans and one monster fighting it out across a single round. Can't handle that much choice? Just pop it in Commentary mode, and watch eight minutes of action from Turtle Rock's upcoming co-op shooter.

Evolve looks like a more monstrous Left 4 Dead, which makes sense, as it's being developed by the original creators of Valve's co-op series. It's a five-player competitive game, in which four people team up as humans, and battle a giant, evolving monster. For more details, check out Ben's hands-on impressions.

Bohemia Interactive have released a whole series of community guides, focused on teaching the game's players to be better soldiers. This latest one is a little more ambitious: teaching how to be a better god. Specifically the god Zeus, who sits atop the battlefield as game master of troops, tanks and tactical assaults. The video is devoted entirely to Arma 3's new Zeus multiplayer mode, and features Shack Tactical's 'Dslyecxi' explaining how to get the most out of its birds-eye military management.

Released earlier this month as a free update, Zeus gives players the ability to direct a multiplayer battle in real-time. Through it, GMs can spawn new units and hazards, creating a new, reactive game mode in which players must react to unique scenarios created on the fly.

To see more of Dslyecxi's Community Guides, take a look through the official Bohemia's Arma 3 YouTube playlist.

Can a top-down game be terrifying? If you're an RTS player, you already know the answer. Breaching a fog-of-war with a small, exploratory force, only to run head-long into a 20-unit Mammoth Tank assault? Pant ruining, let me tell you.

Darkwood is hoping that the top-down view can also provide more atmospheric scares. The horror roguelike showed off its twisted, creeping dread through a couple of pre-alpha trailers released last year. Now, a new video is preparing players for an upcoming Early Access release.



The Darkwood Steam page is already live, and sporting a "Coming Soon!" designation. As usual, the Early Access description explains the scope of this impending initial release. "The current version of the game is very playable," write developers Acid Wizard Studios, "with most of the core features implemented, but a lot of stuff still to come. The game is divided into chapters, and currently you can play through the first one. We're still in development though, so there WILL be bugs, missing features, and a general lack of balance and polish." The developers go on to say that people shouldn't enter the Early Access version if they hate spoilers, bugs, or just want a finalised experience.

Those that do want to jump straight in will find a free-roaming survival horror that blends elements from RPGs, roguelikes and adventure games. Darkwood follows a day/night cycle, with players scavenging and trading by day, and barricading against unknown terrors by night.

Trends and fads come and go in gaming, just like they do everywhere else. First came the Zombies, then came the roguelikes, then, well zombies again. If Aztez, an Aztec-themed brawler, is part of a new trend in historic side-scrollers with incredible art styles, then it is a trend I heartily endorse.



We saw something similar with Apotheon, a Greek-themed side-scroller, but Aztez looks more bloody and chaotic or maybe the black-and-white color scheme just makes the blood pop. Either way, the devs at Team Colorblind have built a real stunner of a trailer for Aztez. The game will bounce between turn-based strategy and side scrolling beat-em-up sequences as you work to expand the Aztec empire. As an Aztez, an elite warrior, you ll be sent in to squash revolts, curb plagues,eliminate political opponents, coerce powerful neighbors, protect allies, and more. Sounds like a busy job, doing the dirty work for an entire empire, but it looks like fun.

There s also a real weight to the attacks, sending characters flying around the place. Get a load of the heft of this club:



Beautiful. Head to the Aztez website and the devblog for more details and to follow along. Aztez will be released this year on Steam.

Still getting crushed by a stream of Murlocs? In the first of a series of articles, our friendly Hearthstone expert shows you why some decks seem so unfair, and how to counter them.

Well met, PC Gamer readers and Hearthstone fanatics. My name is Vincent Sarius, and I've been playing Hearthstone since October, during which time I've reached the 'Legend' rank in every season on the European server. In this series of articles I'm going to make you a better Hearthstone player by revealing the strategy behind some of the game's key concepts, showing you some killer decks created by other expert players, and explaining how the game itself is evolving.

Which brings us to our topic for today: The Hearthstone "metagame", and how understanding it will improve your performance. Metagame is a term used in games of all kinds to describe "the game beyond the game", or in other words the dominance of certain strategies and play styles, which become popular in the community because of their perceived effectiveness. The metagame invariably keeps evolving as players find new ways to defeat currently trendy techniques. This is known as "breaking the meta". In Hearthstone, much like Magic: The Gathering, the metagame is exemplified by a particular deck becoming heavily used on the Ranked Ladder.

However, generally speaking, even the most seemingly effective deck will have a flaw. Decks tend to gain traction and popularity because there either isn t a deck which capitalizes on this flaw yet, or there is but that deck is currently unpopular. As decks appear which do expose or capitalize on the flaw, the previously dominant deck will often be tweaked (by its creator, or other players who've copied it) to counteract these newly unfavorable match-ups. One of the most exciting aspects of Hearthstone, for me, is how immensely fluid this makes the metagame feel. A deck which is commonly considered to be the best one week will often barely played the next. Usually, the new best deck will be the one that crushed the previous one, and so on ad infinitum.


A dog's life for hunters
To get a sense of why some decks originally rose to prominence, and then subsequently dropped out of favor, let's start with Hunter class. A while ago, playing as a Hunter was very different. It largely had one viable type of deck, which relied on an old iteration of the Unleash The Hounds card that gave all of your Beasts +1 Attack and Charge, enabling them to score 'cheesy' one-turn kills. Over the course of Hearthstone's beta Blizzard removed, or severely gimped, any combo which could theoretically kill an opponent in one turn on an empty board. The first of these nerfings saw Unleash The Hounds redesigned into it's current form, but with a slightly at higher mana cost of four mana. The one-turn-kill Hunter was gone.

Subsequently the Hunter languished as one of the widely regarded worst heroes, until Blizzard halved the mana cost of Unleash The Hounds, which drew back the attention of some of the better players and deck builders. Eventually this led to the creation of a deck known as the Chakki Hunter (check out the cards here), and also known as the Beatdown or Facerush Hunter. This deck's purpose is to simply kill the opponent quickly with strong Charge creatures, and punish any minions they chose to place by drawing cards and doing damage with an Unleash The Hounds + Starving Buzzard, often throwing in a Timber Wolf to increase the damage. This is probably one of the most hated decks by players in the lower ranks, simply because it often feels like there is nothing you can do if you don't draw the perfect cards to counteract it. Although, as you re about to see, that s not the case.

This Chakki Hunter prompted a big increase in the use of minions with the Taunt ability, and a greater focus on survivability in many of the decks designed to last until the late-game when both players have large mana pools. Probably the most effect counter deck was the Kitkatz Warrior, a very late-game Control deck with amazing survivability and great removal options for the weak creatures that Chakki was running. (A Control deck is one used to play reactively against your opponent s threats until the late-game, when its high cost cards arrive to crush the opponent.) For most of March and April, I would say this was the strongest deck. It had it all: A great burst combo, enabling it to do massive damage over the course of one or two turns, and a strong mana curve, meaning a balanced spread of card costs to ensure flexibility at all times. However, it wasn t to last. The Hunter adapted.

The latest trendy evolution of the Hunter is now known as the Kolento/Gaara or Midrange Hunter deck, although the original iteration of this deck was made by Lifecoach, a top 30 NA player and former professional Poker pro. This deck still utilizes the Unleash The Hounds combo, but it focuses on stronger, more durable Beasts. Synergizing the abilities of the deck s many Beast minions to great effect.

Just a few days ago, this deck constituted at least half of the matches in the Rank 1-3 bracket, and a large percentage of the 'Legend' bracket as well. It's currently the deck to beat, and demonstrates how the Hunter has evolved from cheesy one-turn Kills into a less gimmicky, more value-focused midrange deck.


The warlock visits the zoo
So, what other decks are big on the ladder right now? Probably the other most hated deck after the Beatdown Hunter is the Zoo Warlock deck, which is focused on playing very cheap minions, fueled by the Warlock's hero power which enables him to draw a card at the cost of taking two damage, which helps continually exert pressure and control the board.

A lot of players seem to believe that this makes it a 'Rush' deck i.e. one that relies on overwhelming early aggression to secure a quick win but it's actually more of a midrange Control deck, built around buffs allowing cheap creatures to 'trade up' by sacrificing lower cost minions to remove your opponent's more expensive ones. The design design philosophy being that if you re the one who chooses what creature to attack, you have a natural advantage. In this case, the Zoo name was given in honor of a very popular Red/Green/White Magic:The Gathering deck which had much the same idea: Lots of cheap, durable creatures.

The best current iteration of the Warlock Zoo deck was built by Reynad, a popular Twitch.tv streamer, though it s heavily influenced by an earlier Warlock Control deck made by Curi. Unlike the Beatdown Hunter, no clear-cut counter to Zoo has emerged yet, however certain decks make for a very favorable match-up against it.


Rogue sets the tempo
Currently, the best option against the Warlock Zoo is the Savjz Tempo Rogue deck. This is a deck designed to dictate the 'flow' of the game through superior mana usage, which is known as Tempo . Against decks which seek to control the board such as Zoo, the Tempo Rogue has an advantage due to many of the Rogue cards being very good against low health creatures, while also being cheap enough that they can be played early in the match before the Zoo player has wrested the board away from you.

In particular, cards like Backstab and SI:7 Agent make it very hard for the Warlock to actually get its important creatures to 'stick' on the board often they get removed before they can have any impact. If the Zoo player is unable to get an early advantage, they tend to lose. However, the Tempo Rogue deck also suffers from the same problem as the Beatdown Hunter large durable creatures with the taunt ability can stop the deck in its tracks. This is part of the reason why Tempo Rogue has never become as popular as the Zoo Warlock or Chakki Hunter decks it has a few very good match-ups, but also a bunch of bad ones.
Trial, and less error
Try out some of these decks and see how you get on. Especially at the lower ranks, their effectiveness will catch many players off guard, and by using them you'll come to understand what it is about the combination of cards that makes them so powerful. (Don't worry if you haven't got all the exact cards, just substitute them for ones which have similar attributes and abilities.) Next week we'll be looking at how to build your own unique deck, incorporating some of the ideas from this article like Tempo, Mana Efficiency and Card Advantage. Creating your own deck is a big part of the fun in Hearthstone, and certainly more so than copying the cards of high-profile players or 'Netdecking', as it s known.

Next week: Why having a strong Mana Curve is so important when designing a deck, and the best ways to synergize different elements of your deck.